The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey started out several yearsago with the jazzy name but an overly funky sound. Theimprov thing was there in spots, but sometimes the boysseemed more concerned with being MCs than emissaries. Afterthe first couple of years and the first thousand Medeski,Martin and Wood bootlegs, Jacob Fred evolved into a truejazz odyssey — and never have its members so deeply exploredthe innocently psychedelic spirit of improvisation than inthis side project, a trio of keyboardist Brian Haas,bassist Reed Mathis and drummer Matt Edwards.

The Jacob Fred Trio has been playing weekly at the Bowery for sixmonths, and this single disc captures a handful of theband's best moments there, including Haas' invigorating"Good Energy Perpetuates Good Energy," a meanderingThelonious Monk medley that morphs into an original tributeto former Tulsa bassist Al Ray ("The Man Who AdjustedTonalities") and a rhapsodic opener, "Pacific," by Odysseytrombone player Matt Leland's father, Max. All of it movesin the same impressionistic space, not leaving you with anylasting tunes but leaving your ears a little looser.

Negativland is a band of self-described "culture jammers"whose musical collage art has landed them in hot waterduring the last decade.

The band's music is a process of cutting up, splicingtogether and warping various sounds and recordings, nettingthe flotsam and jetsam of our media culture and fusing itback together in striking, poignant and sometimes grotesquenew shapes — and often, new statements. It's just like thoseart-school collages, only in aural, not visual, art.

It's a less-traveled road which has made all thedifference for Negativland.

Two decades and countless lawsuits into its career,Negativland is touring for the first time in seven years.The True/False Tour brings the band's culture blending intoa live and ultimately more bracing setting. The multi-mediashow incorporates musical instruments and countless sounddevices, as well as eight film projectors and three slideprojectors.

"It took us two years to develop this show because wewanted to be able to do it right and to create somethingthat very few people have experienced before," said MarkHosler, a charter Negativland member. "About 85 percent ofthe show, too, is all original material that nobody hasheard before. We actually even collage our own materialfrom our own records."

Indeed, by 1986 — when a group showed up named Pop WillEat Itself — Negativland already had established the recipefor that meal. Raiding the sonic junkyards of suburbanculture — television, telephones, other people's records --and juicing up the sounds with occasional keyboards andpercussion, Negativland began in 1980 making records thatwere disjointed aural sculptures.

The core members of Negativland met at an after-schooljob: conducting telephone surveys about people's favoriteTV shows. Discovering a shared fascination for tinkeringwith noises, they followed a friend's advice and assembledtheir first collages into a self-titled album.

"The covers were all hand-made, not because that's whatwe wanted to do but because we didn't know how you gotthings printed, how you turned a piece of artwork intoprinted pieces of cardboard," Hosler said. "So I spent mysenior semester of art class making the covers by hand,using old wallpaper books and such. The covers, basically,were collages, too."

In the visual arts, this appropriation rarely raises anyconcerns, but in music — particularly since the advent ofhip-hop and sampling — the word "appropriation" attractslawyers like blood attracts sharks. Negativland hasreceived more than its share of mail with "Attorneys at Law"in the return address, starting with 1989's "Helter Stupid"album, the cover of which featured a photo of convictedMinnesota mass murderer David Broom. The album was adisturbing masterpiece on media manipulation.

The most famous run-in with the law, though, occurred acouple of years later when Negativland picked on someonemuch bigger. The band released a single called "U2," whichmade fun of Bono's band by picking out the melody of "IStill Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on kazoos andincluded tapes of a profanity-laced studio tantrum byswell-guy radio star Casey Kasem. The resulting legalbattle with U2 galvanized the band as crusaders forredefining the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. Thebattle and the band's resulting theories are chronicled ina book, "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral2," and the group's web site is now a clearinghouse fordiscussion of the limits of sampling and collage uses ofother musicians' work — the difference between piracy and"the transformative re-use of material from multiple sourcesto create new, original works . . . Collage is not theft."

"In the visual arts, collage is making one-of-a-kindpieces, and it's under the label of fine art. Music,though, is mass produced. It's pop culture. The moniedinterests are more involved and they make it into a wholenew ball game," Hosler said. "Nobody cared when we were doingthis back in the '80s. Only with hip-hop becoming a biggerpart of music did things change.

"The mentality has changed. We saw it happen with the`U2' single, and now it's happening with computers and theInternet. Napster is a front-page story on USA Today, andit's all about the issues we started dealing with in '90and '91. Once it becomes digital, the concept of theft andproperty is turned on its head. The original and the copyare the same. And the way the music industry makes money isby having tight control over the distribution, so once thatbecomes endangered, they freak out. These threats againstNapster are the terrified screams of a dying industry thatwants to stop the future from happening."

Hosler, in fact, sees virtually all art as collage art.In other words, every new idea is simply the recombinationof other, old ideas into a new form.

"That's the natural creative impulse — it'stransformational more than purely creative, as in startingfrom nothing," he said. "We take chunks of actual things andrecombine them. It's not outright counterfeit when youcreate something new. But now these businesses want to stopthat, stop people from being creative. Time-Warner and allthat — they want total control of everything and they wantus to sit back and be passive consumers. If you follow thatlogic all the way through, it's the death of culture. It'smean-spirited, and it's just dumb."

The Isley Brothers did OK with "Twist and Shout," but theBeatles made it a monster hit. Same story throughout the'60s with "Respectable" (the Yardbirds, the Outsiders),"Nobody But Me" (the Human Beinz) and "Shout" (Lulu). Theseother groups copied the Isleys' blueprint pretty closelyand somehow scored bigger hits with the same songs.

The Isleys eventually got their due — with R&B hits suchas the shimmering "This Old Heart of Mine," "It's Your Thing"and "Who's That Lady?" — and they look back on those earlydays not as struggles but as a time when their influencehelped direct the flow of modern music.

"The Isley Brothers have always been there as some sortof reference point," said Ernie Isley in an interview thisweek. "We're in the fine print, in the details of rock 'n'roll. Our name may not be called out first, but you alwayssee us in connection with many of the greats. People talkabout Hendrix blah blah blah — and the Isleys are there.People talk about the Beatles blah blah blah — and theIsleys are there ... Now with rap and hip-hop, we're themost sampled of anybody. We're still in the mix."

Indeed, the Isley Brothers have been there from thebeginning, when the first trio of Isley siblings — Ronald,Rudolph and O'Kelly — traveled from Cincinnati to New YorkCity to record a string of doo-wop singles in the '50s.These first songs didn't take the group far at all, butduring a 1959 performance in Washington, D.C., they added aline to their spirited cover of "Lonely Teardrops." The adlib: "You know you make me want to shout." The audience wentwild.

An RCA executive saw the show, and when he signed theIsleys soon after, he told them to build their first RCAsingle around that catch phrase. The song "Shout" was born,and though the Isleys' debut of it never cracked the Top40, "Shout" would become an oft-covered classic, becoming ahit all over again with Lloyd Williams' version in the 1978movie "Animal House."

"We show up in movies all the time," Ernie said. "Thatmovie 'Out of Sight' with George Clooney uses (PublicEnemy's Isley-sampling hit) 'Fight the Power' and 'It'sYour Thing' running throughout. I didn't know that when Iwent to see the movie. I felt proud and humbled at the sametime. I thought, 'Lord, have mercy. Did we do this musicthat keeps pushing these buttons?' "

Ernie Isley joined his older brothers in the familybusiness just as the group was hitting it big. His firstjob was playing bass on the Isleys' No. 2 1969 hit, "It'sYour Thing." He backed up his brothers with bass, guitar andvocals until he and two other family members — brotherMarvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper — joined the olderthree on 1973's "3 + 3" album, featuring the next huge Isleyshit, "Who's That Lady?"

"That was my official coming-out party," Ernie said.

The inclusion of Ernie added a new dimension to theIsleys' lite funk. Trained originally as a drummer, Erniefound his way to guitar, largely inspired by JoseFeliciano's cover of the Doors' "Light My Fire."

Not that he didn't have one of the greatest livingguitarists living in his house. During the Isleys' 1964tour, they recruited a young guitarist from Seattle namedJimmy James. He played on "Testify," the Isleys' first singlefor their independent record label, T-Neck. A couple ofyears later, at the Monterrey Pop Festival, the world wasintroduced to this guitarist under a modified name: JimiHendrix.

"I was 12 years old when Jimmy came around," Ernierecalled. "All I saw was a very talented musician. Icouldn't understand why he practiced all the time, becausehe was already so good. But the thing I saw was more realthan the thing everybody else saw. I saw the unsimonized,unhyped, real, living, breathing person living in my house.My brothers bought him his first Stratocaster.

"People used to have conversations where they'd ask,'Who's the better guitarist: Clapton or Hendrix?' I wasnever popular, because I'd say Jose Feliciano. I mean, hetook this song by the Doors and showed how melodious it is --and he was playing acoustic, and he was blind. I thoughtHendrix was great, too, but not because of 'Purple Haze' or'Foxey Lady' but because of what I heard him play withoutan amp. Nobody wanted to hear that, though."

The Isley Brothers and Jimi Hendrix both were inductedinto the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. During theceremony, Ernie joined the all-star band to sing "PurpleHaze," even playing the guitar behind his back.

The Isleys have found new life in the era of hip-hop,too. As Ernie mentioned, more rappers sample Isley Brotherssongs than even James Brown.

"It started with Public Enemy doing 'Fight the Power.'That was one of the first samples. That was before therewere any ground rules as to how the songwriters andpublishers were going to deal with this. After that, itseemed we started getting about a dozen requests fordifferent songs out of our catalogs on a daily basis. Westill do."

The current Isley Brothers lineup includes Ronald, Ernieand Marvin, the same trio that recorded the group's latestalbum in 1996, "Mission to Please." That record was thegroup's first gold album since 1983's "Between the Sheets."

"We're working on another CD," Ernie said. "We gotta keepgoing. This Isley Brothers banner has been flying for morethan 40 years, and I get the feeling there are some peoplewho are just now starting to pay attention. I mean, whatthese guys do seems to dictate which way the wind is goingto blow against the flag. You know, people know whatBritney Spears is doing and what the Backstreet Boys aredoing. But what are the Isleys doing?"

The Isley Brothers When: 8 p.m. ThursdayWhere: Brady Theater, 105 W. BradyTickets: $40.50 on thefloor, $36.50 in the balcony, available at the Bradybox office and all Dillard's outlets

He and his quintet, the Detroit Wheels, did for soulmusic in the '60s what Elvis did for rock 'n' roll in the'50s: introduced it to a white audience. Ryder, the SpencerDavis Group, the Animals — these groups comprised the bridgefrom the underlying groove of Temptations and Four Topshits to the soul influences that showed up at the turn ofthe '70s in groups ranging from Joe Cocker, Traffic(featuring Steve Winwood, the engine in the Spencer DavisGroup), all the way to Springsteen.

Ryder, in particular, was an indispensable shaman. Withhis frayed, dizzying wail, Ryder led the Wheels'piston-pumping backbeat through a string of tightly woundhits in '66 and '67 — "Jenny Take a Ride," "Sock It to Me,Baby," "Devil With the Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly" --all of which evoked the pioneers of soul before him whilelaying down his own tread on the music. Without Ryder'sshot of energy, it's questionable whether fellow Detroitrockers like Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, the MC5 and even theStooges would have had enough gunpowder to explode out ofMotor City.

The Hanson brothers know a lot about Ryder.They covered a few of his hits in concert and on theresulting live album largely because they were raised onthat music. Living abroad and being home-schooled here inTulsa throughout their youth (which ain't over yet), theyenjoyed a unique isolation with those old rock and soulcollections and fed on that same high energy — so much sothat when they themselves finally emerged into the musicalworld, their own unique gifts transmitted the same power.On the trio's eagerly anticipated follow-up to itsmulti-platinum debut, they finally seize that opportunity,like Ryder, to divine the hidden glories of American soulmusic to a new generation — a new, white, affluentgeneration — as well as to define their own sights,synergies and sound.

In summary, it RRRocks.

"This Time Around" could have been a wreck. Early reportswere not good — initial sessions with former Cars frontmanand producer extraordinaire Ric Ocasek had been scrappedfor murky reasons (translation: the record label didn'thear another "MMMBop"), and Hanson had been shoved back intothe studio with Stephen Lironi, the producer of Hanson'ssmash debut, "Middle of Nowhere." The debut was certainly agood record, but had Hanson merely retreaded it for thefollow-up, they'd be destroyed. Too many eyes were on them,too many ears — too many expectations for a great leapforward.

What a leap they've made. Lironi's presence on "This TimeAround" can be heard in the pitiful scratching sounds thatdumb down otherwise solid tracks like "If Only," but the newrecord is clearly a committed assertion by three willfulyoungsters determined to avoid being written off amid theboy-band craze they helped to create. There's still notanother "MMMBop" here. One wonders how much they had to fightthe corporate money-changers to take the steps evident here— the unabashed soul, the high-octane rock 'n' roll — andwhether the marketing department at Island Def Jam isstymied as to how they'll push the record.

They certainly can't be worried about the record'spotential. "This Time Around" could play on virtually anyradio station — that is, within any confining format. Send"Dying to Be Alive" to a classic R&B station. Drop "Save Me"among the silly modern rock balladry of Kid Rock and ThirdEye Blind, or at least send it to adult contemporary. Makesure to twist the arm of mainstream rock moguls so theyplay "This Time Around." Heck, they don't even have toback-announce it — run it up against a Black Crowes song andyour average KMOD listener probably wouldn't even blink.

The worry is whether or not those other radio stations willdeign to give Hanson a chance this time around. After all,Hanson's a kiddie band, right? They're like the BackstreetBoys, they don't belong at the table with the adults.

That attitude is pretty prevalent (especially among theaudience this record could hit the hardest — people my age,on either side of 30), and "This Time Around" likely will bea slow burn compared to "Middle of Nowhere." There's plentyof fuel for the fire, though. The tunefulness and the hooksthey mastered the first time around are still here, but thetunes are more complex, the hooks more skillfully cast. Thetitle-track single tip-toes out of the gate with a softpiano introduction, but by the chorus it's chugging with a300-horsepower riff and see-sawing between the contrarypowers of Journey and Stevie Wonder. "Dying to Be Alive"draws heavily on the boys' soul influences and features asmall gospel choir led by Rose Stone (of Sly and the FamilyStone). On "In the City," Hanson dances on the edge ofaccessibility, bleeding off the sunshine from thearrangement and singing a pretty desperate plea to anadulterous partner. "You Never Know" opens the record as ifthe boys have gone to War, brightening a heavy groove andsinging, perhaps portentously, "You never know, baby / Younever know, baby / You judge the song by a lie that wastold."

Or he could be singing "soul." As with all great soulsingers, it's hard to discern the words accurately. Taylor,the middle Hanson boy and its forthright lead vocalist, iscertainly a great soul singer, possibly one day to behailed among the best of Generation Y (though Macy Gray isgoing to give him one hell of a fight for that title). Hisvoice is immensely powerful and dynamic — if that come-backline "Do you know why I died?" at the end of the title trackdoesn't stop your heart, double-check that you're stillactually alive — and when, as he grows older, it becomes apartner to his passions, he might rewrite the story ofJericho. It's a SOULFUL voice, too, full of chewyinflections and gritty, guttural wails. It seems to comefrom an unspoken inner drive, a burgeoning catharsis, morethan a heady desire to convey a literate message.

Granted, soul music is virtually dead today — replaced byslick, machine-driven R&B, which has nothing whatsoever todo with the rhythm and blues that created the acronym inthe first place — but Taylor's pipes and his brothers'developing rhythmic chops on this CD could be cracking openthe coffin. (And to the credit of Isaac's and Zac'sinstrumental talents, this album's guest players like JonnyLang and Blues Traveler's John Popper wholeheartedly failto steal the show.) Ryder & Co. translated the music acrosslines of color; Hanson could transfer the music acrosslines of age and experience. Either way, "This Time Around"is one teeth-rattling, high-energy rock fest.

In 1971, Willis Alan Ramsey cut his first record. Theself-titled debut, released through Leon Russell'sTulsa-based Shelter Records, sold modestly, but it packedan influential wallop in Ramsey's adopted home state ofTexas. That one record, it has been claimed,single-handedly spawned the alternative-Nashville stancethat has made Austin, Texas, the so-called live musiccapital of the world.

Just don't ask Ramsey when his next record will appear.

"That's an area I really don't want to go to," he says,dodging the requisite inquiries about his work since thatfirst — and, thus far, only — album ("Have you been writingall this time?" "Has anything been recorded?" "Will we ever seea second album?").

"Willis Alan Ramsey" remains the songwriter's one-hitwonder, and nearly 30 years later many musicians stillinvoke it as the fountainhead of their inspiration. ARamsey show was the first concert a young Lyle Lovett everattended, and he has reported that it inspired him to startwriting songs. Lovett also has covered songs from that"Ramsey" album, as have such artists as Jimmy Buffett,America, Waylon Jennings, Sam Bush, Shawn Colvin, JimmieDale Gilmore, Kate Wolf, Jerry Jeff Walker and, of course,the Captain and Tenille, who made Ramsey's "Muskrat Love" aTop 5 hit in 1976.

Indeed, never has one batch of 11 songs had suchstamina, and rarely does one find a songwriter so humble --almost insecure — about such influence. While remainingenigmatic about his affairs during the last 29 years,Ramsey frequently writes off his initial experience to thepure luck of youth and happenstance. "I was just a kidknocking around," he said, in a rare interview last week, inwhich Ramsey eked out a tale of time, Tulsa and tenacity.

Seeking Shelter

Born in Birmingham, Ala., and raised in Dallas by hisGeorgia-native parents, Ramsey graduated high school and"got away as quick as I could." He dropped south to Austinwhere he explored some of the guitar-picking he'd beentinkering with. Ray Wylie Hubbard's fledgling band tooknotice of his skills and asked Ramsey to open some of itsshows in 1969.

"I was playing the UT coffee house, and I heard that Leon(Russell) and Gregg Allman were in town playing a festivaland staying at the same hotel. So I walked in, knocked onboth their doors and told them I thought they should giveme a listen," Ramsey said. "It was a pretty asinine thing todo back then, and I guess they thought I was so cocky theygave me the chance. I played my songs for Leon and hisroadie, and then for Gregg and (Allman Brothers guitarist)Dickey Betts, right there in their rooms."

Both musicians heard promise in Ramsey's material, andboth offered him contracts on their record labels — Allman'sAtlanta-based Capricorn Records and Russell's Shelter,based then in Los Angeles. Ramsey sought Shelter — withpossibly purely personal motives. "I've never reallythought about this," Ramsey chuckled, "but I guess since mywhole family was from Georgia I liked the idea of going toL.A. better than being closer to Atlanta."

Mad dogs and Southerners

Ramsey headed to L.A. to cut his record in Russell'shome studio, "probably the first professional home studioanyone had in the world," he said. He was largely left tohis own devices, as Russell had decided to move back toTulsa.

"At that point, Leon decided he'd had enough of NorthHollywood and wanted to move back to Tulsa," Ramsey said. "Heand Denny (Cordell, Russell's and Ramsey's producer andmanager) had good luck with Shelter, so they took it home.Leon bought that whole block with a church on it and put ina studio . . . He left me in his L.A. place, so I got tolearn how to work in a studio — by myself. I learned how towrite in the studio. That's something Leon taught me: howto use the studio as a writing tool."

Most of Ramsey's record was completed in L.A., withRussell helping out and adding piano to one track, "GoodbyeOld Missoula." It was that work directly with Russell thatmade Ramsey feel every bit the lucky kid just knockingaround.

"I was a kid musically, and I was stretched and stretchedto the point where I was way past my musical abilities," hesaid. "Leon would put you in a studio with Jim Keltner ondrums, Carl Radle on bass and Don Preston on electricguitar, and he'd sit at the piano. He'd say, `Well, thissong needs an acoustic guitar solo. Willis, why don't youjust play a solo here.' I was 20 and not in the space whereI could just do that on the spot yet. I was definitely overmy head."

Ramsey's record came out in 1972 and sold moderately --not well enough to give Ramsey the escape he needed. Ramsey-- like nearly all Shelter artists, from Russell to PhoebeSnow — fell out with Cordell, but without big profits hecouldn't get out of his Shelter contract.

"I didn't have enough sales to be able to just leave andtell my lawyers to clean it up. Tom Petty did, Phoebe Snowdid, I couldn't afford to," he said.

So he sat out his contract — all eight years of it. Bythe time it ran out, it was 1980, Ramsey was in thedoldrums of a divorce and had been all but forgotten bynon-musicians. He bought some synthesizers and "fooledaround with those," but he quickly found that there was noplace for a shy, sensitive songwriter in the "Urban Cowboy"'80s.

"I just didn't want to play in a place with a mechanicalbull in it," Ramsey said.

I will survive

Since then, Ramsey says, cryptically, he's been writing.He wants to record again, but he's not sure he'll ever getto do it on his terms — which is the only way it'll happen,he said.

"My No. 1 goal right now is to have more kids. No. 2 isto make more records," he said. "But making records thesedays requires a record label, and label budgets are smallthese days. That record of mine cost $80,000 to make, whichwould be about $300,000 in today's dollars. It was a prettyexpensive first-time record in 1972. I'm not the kind ofguy who can make a $30,000 record. It takes me longer.There's too much I want to do."

He still performs around the region — "some old songs,some new" — drawing a sizeable cult following. He's evenappeared on a record recently, coming out of the woodworkto sing on two Lovett records in the '90s, "Joshua JudgesRuth" and "I Love Everybody."

Last year, Koch Records reissued "Willis Alan Ramsey" onCD, and the record has begun to find a fresh audience.

"It still gets around," Ramsey said. "It's been a realwork-horse all this time."

Ramsey on Oklahoma

Willis Alan Ramsey recorded his one and only record forShelter Records back in Leon Russell's heyday. That meanthanging out in Tulsa at Russell's many area studios, where"you'd go to pick up the phone, and it would be GeorgeHarrison or someone," Ramsey said. Here are a few of hisrecollections and praise of his Okie counterparts: "Iwas in the process of finishing up my record and got towork with people like Leon and Jamie Oldaker. J.J. Caletook me in the studio. I was hanging out with guys likeGary Gilmore and Jesse Davis, both of whom played with TajMahal. Chuck Blackwell, too. Some pretty serious musicianscame out of Tulsa. I mean, Jimmy Lee Keltner — he andOldecker . . . if Tulsa can produce two drummers like that,well, they're the best, in my opinion. Those Tulsa boysraised me in the studio."

"When I was playing the Cellar Door Club in (Washington)D.C., this long-haired kid would come sit on the backsteps, and I'd get him in for free. He was going to thePeabody Institute in Baltimore. When he finally got upenough nerve to play the acoustic guitar for me, he turnedout this amazing stuff. He said, 'What should I do withthis?' and I said, 'I dunno, but you'd better dosomething.' It was Michael Hedges."

"I still say this, and most people I know say it, too:Leon Russell is a musical genius. He still is. He's soincredibly talented, and he's a free thinker. Lots ofTulsans are . . . But I don't think he ever reallyscratched the surface of his ability."

"It was in the '60s when I figured out I wanted to writeand say some things. In New York, I found a book calledBorn to Win, a compilation of Woody Guthrie's songs,stories, poems, letters and drawings. It was this fabulousdirect hit from his pen, with his own unique voice. Evenwhen I think about that book today, it still really doesmotivate me. He was another free-thinking Okie. There wassomething about the way he could connect with the thoughtand deliver it to you totally unvarnished. So visceral, butso elegant . . . (My song) 'Boy From Oklahoma' is sort of aromanticized version of Woody."

These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office.